Harry casts worldwide spell

The reality matched the hype yesterday as the latest Harry Potter book continued to fly off the shelves at a record rate.

More than 1m copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are estimated to have been sold in Britain over the weekend.

An average of 220 copies were bought every minute at Tesco supermarkets, with 317,400 copies sold by the chain in the first 24 hours after the book went on sale at one minute past midnight on Saturday.

WH Smith said the fifth instalment of the exploits of the boy wizard Harry and his boarding school friends was the fastest selling book ever. It expects the novel to be 10 times more popular than its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was the previous fastest seller.

Amazon, the online retailer, said the novel had broken internet sales records, with more than 1.3m advance orders worldwide, including more than 420,000 in the UK. The delivery of the book is the largest distribution of any single item in e-commerce history.

Stores across America also opened in the middle of the night to cater for thousands of people who queued to buy the book. Scenes of Pottermania were the same elsewhere, from Taiwan to Kenya. Nearly 2,700 customers at a Borders bookstore in Singapore pre-ordered the book, with the first buyer arriving 10 hours before it went on sale.

Laure Strauss, a bilingual Parisian, bought the book at an English language bookstore in Paris. "You've got to read it in English," she said. "The way they say 'Muggles' in French - it doesn't sound right."

Among the various Asian language editions that will be published, the Thai and Chinese versions are due by December. The book also went on sale at the Xinhua book store in Beijing, in what shop officials said was China's first participation in a global book launch.

The latest episode in the Pot ter saga comes nearly three years after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Publisher Bloomsbury has said that the unprecedented demand would drive profits to a new high.

It is printing around 13m copies of The Order of the Phoenix. The first four Harry Potter books have sold 195m copies in almost 200 countries.

One avid early reader whizzed through the book in just over an hour and a half. Jennifer Gosling, 15, from Burleigh College, Loughborough, is said to have speed read the 766-page volume as part of a challenge against her classmates.

However, about 2 million blind and partially sighted people have missed out on the latest adventure.

An audio version of the story is not due out until later this year. It will be two weeks before the first copies come out in Braille, and even then there will be relatively small numbers of these, while the novel will not be out in large print until September 1.